33. Seven Oxford Men. Foundations. A Statement of Christian Belief in Terms of Modern Thought
By Seven Oxford Men—B. H. Streeter, R. Brook, W. H.
Moberly, R. G. Parsons, A. E. J. Rawlinson, H. S. Talbot, W.
Temple. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited. 1913. 1 he character of this book is fairly intimated by its title. The "Seven
T Oxford Men" who have written it describe themselves as young men; and, as young men, they conceive their place to be in the advance-line of progress. They feel their responsibility to the church to which they belong; they are loyal in heart to that church; but they consider that the nature of their responsibility is of a different kind from that of older men.
It may be the part of older men to conserve what has been attained; to the younger men belongs the task of leading on to what is yet to be acquired; their responsibility is "the responsibility of making experiments." And the times in which we find ourselves living call loudly for experiments. They are times of transition. The Victorian age is gone; and the assumptions on which Victorian religion was built up have been dissipated. What was
thought to be the bed-rock has become shifting sand. A new world has come into being, a new world which is asking questions. The repetition of old answers can serve no purpose. New answers must be framed, and these answers must be couched in the "terms of modern thought." Young men, children of the new age, cannot breathe "the atmosphere of pre-'critical' and pre-Darwinian religion." They think in other terms; they must at least attempt to express what they think in the terms of the thought-world in which they live. And, indeed, to be perfectly frank, if Christianity cannot be expressed in terms of this new thought-world, Christianity is doomed.
Men of the time are under the stress of a great obligation, therefore, at least to attempt to pour the old wine of Christianity into the new bottles of modern thought.
Adventuring upon this necessary task of transfusion, our "Seven Oxford Men" present us with nine trial essays. They "do not profess to have covered the whole field." They have confined themselves to the problems which seemed to them the most fundamental, or on which they felt they had something to offer. And they speak modestly of what they offer: it is not put forward as the solution, but only as a contribution towards the solution of the problems they have approached. The nine essays which are given, after a general exposition of the modern situation calling for restatement of fundamental principles, treat in turn of "the Bible," "the Historic Christ," "the Interpretation of the Christ in the New Testament,"
"the Divinity of Christ," "the Atonement," "the Church," "the Principle of Authority," "God and the Absolute." Probably only a coterie of Anglican writers—among Protestants at least—would have hit upon just this series of topics, when dealing with Christian fundamentals; could have chosen to write of the Church, for example, instead of the Holy Spirit, or could have separated "the Principle of Authority" so far from "the Bible" and attached it so closely to "the Church." Certainly the "Critical"
preoccupation is very prominent. And one will naturally wonder how, in this age of Psychological investigation, even so short a series of fundamental problems could be outlined without including a single topic belonging to the subjective life—not Sin, for example, or any of the great stages or steps of the recovery of the soul from sin to holiness. The disclaimer of all pretension to have covered the whole field must no doubt be borne in mind here; as must also the fact that the book is not altogether silent on these great subjects. If they are not made the subjects of separate essays, they come up for discussion incidentally, sometimes for rather full discussion.
Sin for instance is discussed as fully as its own proper subject in the essay on "the Atonement," and the essay entitled "the Interpretation of the Christ in the New Testament" is almost a brief sketch of New Testament
Theology. Meanwhile the precise series of topics selected for professed discussion is worthy of remark, as is also the order in which they are discussed. Some explanation is given in the brief Introduction of the rather odd postponement of the discussion of the existence of God to the end.
This amounts to saying that it was thought best to examine in the light of modern knowledge the actual sources from which Christians have derived their conception of God before the validity of the belief in God itself was brought to the question. This would seem a natural ordering of the material if a negative conclusion all along the line were aimed at; it seems to us an unnatural order since it is a positive conclusion that is aimed at.
No one will doubt that Christians of to-day must state their Christian belief in terms of modern thought. Every age has a language of its own and can speak no other. Mischief comes only when, instead of stating Christian belief in terms of modern thought, an effort is made, rather, to state modern thought in terms of Christian belief. The writers of this volume seem not to have escaped this danger. They are preoccupied with modern thought and appear to suppose that Christianity must be assimilated to it.
They open their Introduction by telling us that "Christianity" as well as "its traditional theology" originated in a past of outworn conditions; and they apparently intimate as the condition of the survival of "Christianity" that "its theology" shall not be "out of harmony with science, philosophy, and scholarship." This is, of course, to lay down an impossible condition, if "Christianity" is to be supposed to have any determinate content. For "science, philosophy, and scholarship" are not stable but varying entities, and nothing but a most habile chameleon could manage to keep in harmony with them from age to age. Of course what is meant is our own
"science, philosophy, and scholarship"—which seems to be only a naive way of transferring the claim of infallibility from "Christianity" and "its theology" to ourselves. Nothing is more certain, however, than that a "Christianity" and a "theology" which are closely in harmony with the "science, philosophy, and scholarship" of to-day will be out of harmony with the "science, philosophy, and scholarship" of to-morrow. After all, is it not enough to ask that "Christianity" and "its theology" shall be in harmony with truth? And if it is to be in harmony with truth, must it not be out of harmony with all the half-truths, and quarter-truths, and notruths, which pass from time to time for truth, while truth is only in the making? A "Christianity" which is to be kept in harmony with a growing
"science, philosophy, and scholarship," beating their way onward by a process of trial and correction, must be a veritable nose of wax, which may be twisted in every direction as it may serve our purpose.
The question is of course a question of standard. Is our standard Christianity? Or is our standard our own "science, philosophy, and scholarship," that is to say, the congeries of notions which we have taken up as the outcome of the impact upon us of the results of modern investigation, deeply or shallowly, widely or narrowly, understandingly or misunderstandingly assimilated? If we hold Christianity to be true, we shall
naturally sit loosely to the "science, philosophy, and scholarship" of any passing moment, so far as it seems to traverse the truth of Christianity, and look forward to the better day when trial and correction shall be over and the unity of truth shall be vindicated by its manifested harmony. If we do not hold Christianity to be true, we shall naturally substitute for it the findings of the momentarily accepted "science, philosophy, and scholarship" as at least provisionally the most likely hypothesis. What is a standing puzzle is why we should wish to call by the name of "Christianity" these provisional findings of our "science, philosophy, and scholarship" substituted for it. If "Christianity" has no stable meaning, the name has no content: it is in the strictest sense of the word an empty name. It is a purely formal designation for whatever may chance in any age or in any company to be the sum of the conclusions presumed for the moment to be commended by "science, philosophy, and scholarship." Coteries at one in nothing save in the lack of the thing, may be at each other's throats in strife over the monopoly of the name. Would it not be better to allow that "Christianity" is a historical entity and has a definite content? And then, when we have drifted away from this historical entity with its definite content, just frankly to acknowledge that we are to that extent no longer
"Christians"? That was, for example, what Strauss did. But that is not now the fashion. Men nowadays cheerfully give up the substance, but never the name of Christianity. Rudolf Eucken asks, "Can we still be Christians?" and answers with emphasis, Of course! but the "Christianity" we embrace must be a very different Christianity from that which has hitherto borne the name. So also Ernst Troeltsch declares himself still a "Christian" (a "free
Christian"), though his "Christianity" has been so "refashioned" that it has become nothing more than an "immanent theism," the quintessential extract of the religious development of mankind, which still clings to the name of Jesus only because it needs a rallying-point and a name to conjure
with. We are not suggesting that the writers of our present volume have drifted away from Christianity as have Rudolf Eucken and Ernst Troeltsch.
But we are suggesting that they have in common with such writers the tendency to employ the term "Christianity" to express not a historical entity of fixed content, but just what they may themselves happen to believe. They have lost to this extent an objective standard of what
Christianity is.
How completely they have lost an objective standard of what Christianity is appears at once from the first essay proper in the book—that on "the Bible." It is written by Mr. Richard Brook. Its central contention is that the Bible has no "authority." It is simply the record of the religious experience of its writers. These writers were no doubt religious geniuses, and their religious experience is therefore in a sense normative. "We go to the Bible in order to deepen and correct our religious lives by the aid of the Biblical writers" (p. 66). "And so I go to the Bible, as others have gone before me, to learn from those who have heard God speak, seeking by their help to see the vision they saw, and finding in their words inspiration and power" (p. 71). In this sense we may still speak of the "authority" of the Bible. "Yet it still remains true that the ultimate appeal for each is to his own experience" (p. 59). The Bible may inspire, it cannot directly instruct: we go to it specifically for religion, not for, say, theology (p. 68). The theology of the Bible is necessarily very inadequate: our own may be—one would think, must be—better: "in some ways our theology may be more adequate than that of St. Paul" (p. 68). But not our religion. We may, nay must, kindle our flame from Paul's, but we can interpret the implications of the fire once enkindled in our hearts better than he could. "We can learn more religion from the humblest saint," we are told, "than from the greatest theologian" (p. 68), but this is only half of what is meant to be conveyed to us: the point is the entire separation of saintliness from
theology, and the other half of the lesson we are expected to draw from the illustration is that we cannot learn theology even from the greatest saint.
For religion "we may, or rather we must go to St. Paul," for example, but we may safely neglect his theology. Theology is "the intellectual interpretation" of religion, and we must needs do our own interpreting, and we feel ourselves better equipped for the task than Paul was.
Clearly all this rests on a fatally false conception of the relation of religion and theology. "Theology," we are told crisply, "is the science of religion" (p. 38). This, however, it of course just is not. Ex vi verbi it is the science of God. It most decidedly is not "the reflexion upon religious experience, the attempt to interpret, to understand and to systematise it."
That is what "the science of religion" is—quite a different thing from "theology." What theology is, is reflection on God and on all that we know concerning God. It is not then the product of religion any more than—or indeed as much as—religion is the product of it. What it precisely is, is the product in the intellect of the same body of facts of which religion is the product in the life: religion and theology are parallel and interactive products of the same body of facts and are too intimately related to be separated (cf. p. 379). One would like to see religion defined without involving theology. Is not religion the reaction of the human spirit in the presence of God? And how is the human spirit to be in the presence of God except by intellectual apprehension? By as much as man is an intelligent being, by that much he cannot react to objects unperceived. Perception, ripening into conception, underlies all religious reaction; and as is the perception ripening into conception, so is the religion. Otherwise we should be committed to the proposition that fetishism is as good a religion as Christianity. For precisely that in which fetishism differs from Christianity is its theology: take away the differences in the conception of deity and you take away the differences in the religious functioning. Mr.
Brook is not so far from adopting this view as could be wished. "The same religious experience will be differently interpreted, not only at different times," he reasons in his endeavor to lay a basis for refusal to be governed by the "theology" of the Biblical "writers" (p. 38), "but even by different individuals at the same time. The Professor and the Blacksmith, in so far as they are religious, may have the same religious experience, but their
'theological' views, their 'thoughts' about God, are and must be widely different." Why not, instead of the Professor and the Blacksmith, say the Christian and the Fetish-worshiper: gradus non mutant speciem? Is it not because the Professor and the Blacksmith are surreptitiously supposed both to be Christians, that is, to have the same "theology" underlying and giving form to their religious experience? In point of fact the Professor and the Blacksmith, though both have religion, will not and cannot have the same religious experience save as they have the same theological conceptions. If one conceives of God as a stock or a stone and the other as an infinite moral person, their religious reaction and the whole complex of their religious experience will be utterly different. Religion, in all its manifestations, waits, like all other human functioning, on the operation of ideas: here too the line of action is from perception, through emotion, to volition. And nothing can be more certain than that if the theology of the Bible is discarded, the religion of the Bible is discarded with it. We shall certainly have religion: we cannot avoid that: man is a religious animal. But our religion will not be the religion of the Bible unless—among other elements of it—our religious conceptions, that is, our theology, be the religious conceptions, that is to say, the theology, of the Bible. It is the gravest kind of self-deception to imagine—to bring the matter to its sharpest point—that we can discard the religious conceptions of Paul, or of Jesus, and remain of the same religion as Paul or Jesus, because forsooth we feel that we too, like them, are religious beings and function religiously. Christianity is not a
distinctive interpretation of a religious experience common to all men, much less is it an indeterminate and constantly changing interpretation of a religious experience common to men; it is a distinctive religious experience begotten in men by a distinctive body of facts known only to or rightly apprehended only by Christians.
As this rejection of all external authority in religious conceptions is principial, it should extend to the authority of Christ also. There are indications that it does so. Jesus is declared to have been not only "not formally impeccable" (though "actually sinless") but also "in nowise exempted from such intellectual limitations, or even (within the spheres of science and history) from such erroneous conceptions of fact, as were inseparable from the use of the mental categories of the age and generation among whom He came" (p. 368). It is even allowed, though guardedly, that His ethical teaching was conditioned by the shortness of His view:
"Doubtless had the Master explicitly contemplated the centuries of slow development still awaiting humanity, the actual form and phrasing of many a precept would have been different. Doubtless, too, He would have let fall a word or two on the creative moral value of institutions like the Family and the State" (p. 109). There is even a shocking paragraph in which Jesus' whole view of His work is represented as a "venture of faith," as if it were a speculative invention of His mind to explain "the facts of the world," that is to say, the experiences to which He was subjected: "Because He believes in the goodness of God, Jesus Christ is sure that His death cannot mean either the end of His life or the ruin of His work. His faith leads Him to see in the apparent failure of His ministry the vindication of the teaching of DeuteroIsaiah as to the redemptive value of suffering, and therefore He sees in the Cross the salvation of mankind, and beyond the Cross the triumph of His risen life" (p. 51). "Doubtless," it is added, "this was a venture of faith, but essentially it was a venture which faith was bound to make." No compelling
reasons are given why we should feel bound to make the venture with Him; why the theological interpretation of the facts of His life made after this fashion by a man of His "intellectual limitations" should be authoritative to us.
The essay on "the Divinity of Christ" (which is by Mr. William Temple) opens with a couple of sentences which, taken in themselves, announce an important truth, that, duly considered, might correct the tendencies of thought to which we have adverted—though Mr. Temple employs them for quite a contrary purpose. They are: "The central doctrine of Christianity has been made unduly difficult by the way in which believers inevitably tend to state it. It is really a doctrine about God; but it is made to appear as if it were primarily a doctrine about a historic Person, who lived at the beginning of our era." In themselves these words might be taken to mean that in thinking of Christ we should always take our start from His Divine Nature and work out from that as our—as it was His— starting-point: though Mr. Temple himself takes the opposite course. In his attempt to construct a doctrine of the Person of Christ it is from the voluntarist standpoint that Mr. Temple works; and he fails precisely as voluntarists are accustomed to fail, by giving us a Christ who seems to be divine only as one can be said to be divine who is one in purpose with God.
It is already ominous that he is constrained to tell us that Paul of Samosata was the first to attempt a construction on this presupposition (p. 226). He hopes to escape the ruin wrought by Paul by refusing to distinguish between Will and Substance (p. 247): to the voluntarist "Will is the only
Substance there is in a man; it is not a part of him, it is just himself as a moral (or indeed 'active') being." It may be doubted, however, whether he really escapes. It does not make Christ God to say that, while His "Will, as a subjective function, is of course not the Father's Will," yet "the content of the Wills—the Purpose—is the same" (p. 248); that "what we see Christ
doing and desiring, that we thereby know the Father does and desires." This only makes Christ (so far) like God. And what shall we do with a passage like this (pp. 248 f.): "He is the Man whose will is united with God's. He is thus the first-fruits of the Creation—the first response from the Creation to the love of the Creator. But because He is this, He is the perfect expression of the Divine in terms of human life. There are not two Gods, but in Christ we see God. Christ is identically God; the whole content of His being—His thought, feeling, and purpose—is also that of God. This is the only 'substance' of a spiritual being, for it is all there is of him at all.
Thus, in the language of logicians, formally (as pure subjects) God and Christ are distinct; materially (that is in the content of the two consciousnesses) God and Christ are One and the Same. The human
Affections of Christ are God's Affections; His Suffering is God's; His Love is God's; His Glory is God's." This is undoubtedly to exalt Christ: does it exalt Him as more than the greatest of the sons of men? Is it not an illusion to suppose that thus the true deity of Christ is vindicated? Let us assume whatever ontology of spiritual being we choose: let us declare that Will is the essence of spirit—if that is not a contradiction in terms. But let us not suppose that thus we abolish the distinction between distinct Subjects.
That the contents of Christ's will is the "same" as the contents of God's will, His purpose the "same" as God's purpose, does not identify Him with God. If it did, then, when two men "have the same thought or the same purpose" they would be "merged into one another"; and it is not enough to say, in order to escape this, that the identity in their case "extends to a very small part of the content of consciousness, while in the case" of Christ and God, "it extends to the whole" (p. 250). We are in danger here of juggling with the ambiguities of "identical," whether as homoousios or homoiousios.
To justify the position taken it would seem that one must accept the postulate that all spirit is one, and individualization is the result only of
differences in the "content" of that will which constitutes its being. When the "content"—the "purpose"—becomes one, the artificial (and temporary) barriers are broken down and spirit becomes confluent. Unless this pantheism is permitted to lie unacknowledged behind our thought, to speak of Christ as identical with God in content of will—in purpose—does not seem to be to speak of Him as divine.
It is part of the "modernness" of these essays that they are very chary in acknowledging the occurrence in our Lord's life—or in the origins of Christianity in general—of what we have been accustomed to call miracles.
More than one of the writers carefully define miracles away. "The best definition of a miracle," we read (p. 167, cf. p. 138) "is that it is something which when we are confronted by it compels us to say, 'This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes': it is no less marvellous if after our first sense of wonder has calmed down we are enabled to see a little further into the divinely-ordered process by which the event was brought about."
The Virgin-birth is not discussed (cf. p. 81). The Resurrection is elaborately explained away by Mr. B. H. Streeter (pp. 127–141) in the interests of the "objective vision hypothesis," and while it is obvious that some of his colleagues agree with him, we are glad to learn (p. 135) that not all of them do. Mr. Streeter can even say (p. 132): "I know of no living theologian who would maintain a physical Ascension in this crude form, yet so long as emphasis is laid on the physical character of the Resurrection it is not obvious how any refinement of the conception of 'physical' really removes the difficulty." He is certainly right in thus bringing together the Ascension and Resurrection—both are physical or neither is: and we think him right in declaring that if they are in any sense physical no refinement of the conception of "physical" will help. In the meanwhile it must be borne in mind that the totality of the testimony is to a physical resurrection. There is not only the empty tomb, which Mr. Streeter but lamely accounts for; but
the whole account of the resurrection appearances, culminating in the explicit declaration of our Lord recorded in Luke 24:39 (of which Mr.
Streeter makes no use), is to be reckoned with—as well as Paul's clear exposition that our resurrection-bodies which are to be like Christ's are veritable "bodies" and are composed of "flesh" (1 Cor. 15:39, 40).
Where the conception of the Person of Christ is so inadequate the conception of His Work is not likely to be less so. We are not surprised to find accordingly that only a "subjective" Atonement is admitted by some of the writers. This seems to be the position of Mr. Temple. In the essay on "the Atonement," which is by Mr. W. H. Moberly, however, a somewhat higher doctrine is taught—the doctrine developed by Dr. R. C. Moberly in his well-known and powerfully reasoned "Atonement and Personality," in which penitence is made to do the work of expiation and Christ's work is summed up in vicarious penitence, whatever that can be. Mr. Moberly accordingly speaks of "moral transformation" as if it could "constitute an atonement for sins," that is, as if, "in removing the cause of estrangement" it removed, "as it were automatically, the estrangement between God and man" (p. 293). He recognizes indeed that man's own penitence would be inadequate; not, he adds, "because it is merely penitence (i.e. only a change of character), but because it is incomplete penitence (i.e. only a partial, and therefore very probably a transitory, change of character)" (p. 295). Thus we escape out of a purely "subjective" atonement—which is a blessing. But all that is offered objectively is a vicarious penitence of Christ, which is perfect and complete—not indeed in itself but in and with its effect in inducing penitence in us: "vicarious penitence is only redemptive when it succeeds in becoming more than vicarious" (p. 310). So firmly grounded is
Mr. Moberly in his theory that he even permits himself to write: "if vicarious penitence is unmeaning and impossible, the problem of atonement is insoluble; for penitence that is not vicarious, the unsupported
penitence of the sinner himself, is never complete or whole-hearted" (p.
308)—from which we learn that not only in his view can penitence atone, but only penitence can atone! Having referred the atoning efficacy in Christ's work thus to His "vicarious penitence," Mr. Moberly is naturally greatly embarrassed in having Christ's death on his hands, to which, rather, the New Testament writers—and indeed Christ Himself—as well as the historical Church refer it. After some pages of discussion he arrives at the point where, as he says, "we can dimly see how the fact of sin and the requirements of holiness made it necessary that Jesus should die" (p. 313)!
The method of Mr. Moberly's essay (a method we do not like) is to set over against each other the "liberal" and the "conservative" views and to seek an "inclusive" view as presumably better than either. It is noticeable that in stating the "conservative" view there is repeated intrusion of elements drawn not from the doctrine of Satisfaction as expounded by the great teachers of the Church, but from the Grotian or Governmental Theory
(pp. 288, 302, 305). The "conservative" view thus does not get a fair hearing, and is made the object of criticisms which do not touch it. As the essay draws to its close Mr. Moberly addresses himself to answering some objections which seem to lie against the whole idea involved in the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. Among them he raises this one— that provision is made by it for only a fraction of the human race (p. 331).
"How can we possibly believe in a divine scheme of salvation for the human race which 'leaves whole continents out of its ken'?" In other words, if Christ is the Saviour of the world, must He not save the world? Mr.
Moberly acknowledges that he has "no complete answer" to this objection, but he thinks he can "see the direction in which an answer is to be sought."
This answer is, in brief, that we do not need to know Christ to be Christ's, supplemented by the suggestion that Christ can do His saving of the world in the next world (p. 332)! The Scriptures, it is needless to say, have a very
different answer. We infer that Mr. Temple agrees in principle with his colleague here, from the circumstance that we find him endeavoring from a wrong point of view to grasp the idea of the "invisible Church," putting into it the heathen sages also, "each in his degree"—whatever that may mean (p. 341).
It is in dithyrambic strains that Mr. Temple speaks of the Church, making use at times of forms of speech to which it is difficult to attach an exact meaning. Some particularly remarkable results are attained by his endeavor to give to language struck out originally from a view of the Eucharist which he does not share, validity from his new point of view as to the "sacrifice of Christ." Jesus is veritably in the Eucharist as beauty is in a great picture, though it is not every eye which can see Him there. "His sacrifice is perpetual": once only in the history of men has its whole nature been set forth, "but the sacrifice itself, which is His obedience and the submission of His will, is eternal" (p. 344). There is a devotion and a mystical ecstacy which is altogether admirable throbbing through his words, but the fire which glows in them has not been kindled at Calvary.
Noble words are spoken about the communion of the saints into which we enter at the Eucharist (pp. 343 f.): our hearts are quickened by the vision which is summoned up of the saints of all ages gathered with us around the table of the Lord, participants with us in the body that was broken and the blood that was shed for us. But the underlying thought is not that of the altar. There seems to be something bizarre in suggesting that the phrase which calls the Church "the Body of Christ" is "probably taken from the Eucharist" (p. 340, cf. p. 185). Surely "This is my body" refers to Christ's literal, not figurative body—to Christ, that is, not to His disciples. They did not eat themselves in symbol! The latter part of the essay on the Church is filled with shrewd good sense, and exhibits a clear perception of the nature and value of Church unity.
In Mr. Rawlinson's essay on "the principle of Authority" a careful comparison is made between various views. It is a pity that Congregationalism is taken as the proper representative of Protestantism in the matter of Church organization and authority. It is as insular as Anglicanism itself: and has no existence outside of lands of English speech.
A world-wide polity like Presbyterianism would have afforded a much truer representative type. Take for example the idea of "the invisible Church." If the twenty-fifth chapter of the Westminster Confession—or its parallel in any of the representative Reformed confessions—had been in Mr.
Rawlinson's mind he could scarcely have written as he has written on pp.
394–395, 404. In the very interesting discussion of the origin of the Christian ministry which is attached to this essay the ordinary confusions into which Anglican writers of liberal tendencies fall are not escaped. When
Mr. Rawlinson says that the "ministry appears to have very early assumed the form of a bishop, presbyters, and deacons to each eucharistic assembly," he seems unaware that, though he defines the individual church in different terms from those that would be natural to a Presbyterian, he has described precisely the Presbyterian polity. When he goes on to say that "the modern diocese is virtually an expansion of the primitive congregation by means of the delegation to presbyters of functions originally episcopal" (p. 422), he is very lightly springing wide chasms. The bishop, the presbyter, the deacon— and the officering of the local church—have each and every one of them suffered a sea-change which has transmuted them into something different from what they are, say, in the Pastoral Epistles—which Mr. Rawlinson, by the way, treats with strange neglect. From a "pastor" of a congregation, the Bishop has become the ruler over many congregations. The Presbyter has ceased to be a co-ruler with the Bishop; and shrinking from a plurality in each congregation to a singularity, has become a pastor. The Deacon from "a server of tables" has lost all connection with the local church and become
an inchoate Presbyter. The local church instead of possessing a Bishop, a college of Presbyters, and a college of Deacons, has left to it only a single
Presbyter. In other words from Presbyterian the church has become Episcopal—and that is a total transformation.
The final essay,—on "God and the Absolute"—by Mr. W. H. Moberly, is the longest in the volume, and while very able is also very unsatisfying. It is in effect an attempt to interpret the doctrine of God in terms of the absolutist philosophy. It with difficulty escapes sheer pantheism, if indeed it does escape it. It is a hard saying to be told that "God Himself must be religious" (p. 512), even though this is transmuted into the declaration that, being a Trinity, He "can know God." It is a harder one to be told that "the union of God and man is necessary to the full reality of either" (cf. p. 520), or that God could not still remain God without creation, incarnation, and atonement (p. 511). It is perhaps even a still harder one to be told that "the world and its history is essential to the very Life and Being of God" (cf. p.
341).
Throughout the whole volume there is apparent a spirit of readiness to weigh and appreciate points of view other than that which may be thought hereditary with its authors. What is more remarkable, this openmindedness is manifested not merely towards what is commonly known as "liberalism" but also towards what is known in average Anglican circles as "sectarianism." For party-spirit apparently dies more hardly than Christian principle. We have known men who were cheerfully willing to give up the deity of Christ but not baptism by immersion alone; and latitudinarian
Anglicanism has perhaps been more common than a truly tolerant one: even our modern "Evangelicals" are solicitous to be understood to be "good churchmen." No one would mistake the writers of this volume for anything but Anglicans. There are indications that they might even be classed as "High Anglicans": Mr. Temple for example pleads for prayers for
the dead and the invocation of saints (p. 346); and remnants show themselves here and there of that smug self-felicitation on the position of Anglicanism midway between Romanism and Protestantism, which betrays so many Anglicans into the notion that the coming unity of Christendom must crystallize as Anglican. But few books have emanated of late from Anglican circles in which is manifested a greater readiness to consider the positions of writers of other communions of Christian men, or to weigh afresh the distinctive contentions of traditional Anglicanism.
We take it that a remark like the following is typical of the general mental attitude of the volume. "In its strictest and most traditional form the theory of an original Apostolic succession has perhaps broken down; but the liberalized restatement of it, which is to be found in the writings of Duchesne and Batiffol abroad and the present Bishop of Oxford at home, is at least a tenable interpretation of the evidence as viewed in the light of certain antecedent presuppositions" (p. 383). We may think it still too much to say even so much as this, and question whether the view still clung to is compatible with the facts. But we recognize the openness of mind which is manifested in the position assumed. And this, we take it, is the most encouraging feature of the volume.
We have dealt with the volume not as a collection of separate essays but as a single whole, because we are asked to do so (p. viii.).
There is a good Index.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, xi. 1913, pp. 526–538.